Judicial diplomacy: international courts and legitimation

Observers of international courts (ICs) note that several ICs carry out a broad range of non-judicial activities, ranging from legal training workshops and public seminars to visits with public officials. Despite the growing prominence of these activities, they have received little attention from scholars. Seeking to fill this gap, this article examines these activities as a form of 'judicial diplomacy', asking how and why ICs employ judicial diplomacy. The article argues that ICs use judicial diplomacy as a means of legitimation. They seek to boost institutional legitimacy through their judicial diplomacy by targeting the public and communicating norm-referential narratives about their processes and outcomes. This argument bears out in case studies on the judicial diplomacy of the African Court of Human and Peoples' Rights and the Caribbean Court of Justice. Both courts are shown to have judicial diplomacy that is public-oriented and people-centred. This argument has important implications for literature on international courts and the legitimacy of international institutions

Could Covid-19 herald the renewal of international cooperation?

The COVID-19 crisis has exposed what some scholars of international organizations have been noticing in recent years: a retrenchment from international cooperation and multilateral approaches to problem-solving. While the Trump administration’s admonishment of the World Health Organization is a political manoeuvre to brandish a scapegoat for the administration’s abysmal failures, it also a telltale sign of broader efforts to withdraw from and undermine international cooperation. However, could COVID-19 herald the renewal of international cooperation,asks Theresa Squatrito (LSE)

Democratic memberships in international organizations: sources of institutional design

Domestic regime type has emerged a powerful explanation of multiple phenomena in world politics. This article extends this argument to the design of international organizations (IOs), where a profound development in recent decades is growing access for transnational actors (TNAs). While earlier research has shown that democracy in IO memberships helps to explain IO openness, we know little about the mechanisms that drive this effect. This article unpacks the relationship between democratic memberships and IO design by theorizing and assessing the impact of three different constellations of democracies on the openness of IOs. Empirically, we conduct a multivariate analysis of TNA access to 50 IOs from 1950 to 2010, combined with a case study of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Our main findings are three-fold. First, democracy’s effect on openness is primarily a product of the combined weight of democracies within IOs and their resulting capacity to secure support for their polity preferences. Second, in contrast, we only find limited support for a specific influence of new democracies and democratic major powers on IO openness. Third, decision rules that allow for openness reforms to be adopted by a majority of member states facilitate and strengthen the influence of democracies, by reducing the ability of autocracies to block change. The findings have implications for our understanding of institutional design in global governance and democracy’s effects in world politics

The democratizing effects of transnational actors' access to international courts

How should we evaluate international courts in terms of their effect on democratic deficits in international law-making? This article takes an initial step toward understanding how ICs improve or weaken the presence of democratic values in international law-making, focusing on one aspect of international courts – access for transnational actors (TNAs). This article argues that TNA access to international courts provides institutional mechanisms for participation and transparency. As widely accepted democratic values, the participation and transparency advanced by TNA access has democratizing effects for international law-making

Amicus curiae briefs in the WTO DSM: good or bad news for non-state actor involvement?

Since 1998, non-state actors have had access to submit an ‘amicus curiae’ brief to the WTO DSM. Like other forms of non-state actor involvement in the WTO, amicus curiae access has been controversial. Despite this controversy, non-state actors have made use of this access and submitted amicus curiae briefs. This article asks: What has come of these briefs once they are submitted and what explains how amicus are treated by the DSM? This article empirically maps amici in all disputes from 1998 (after amicus access was first recognized) through 2014, arguing that amicus access is conditioned by a combination of political and legal constraints faced by the WTO panels and AB. In particular, whether the content of an amicus is considered hinges on it having the endorsement of a disputing party and whether its consideration interferes with the WTO DSM's reputation for coherence. In all, these findings have implications for the debate over whether amicus curiae access is good or bad news for the WTO and non-state actor involvement

Shaming by international organizations: Mapping condemnatory speech acts across 27 international organizations, 1980–2015

In the face of escalating conflicts or atrocities, international organizations (IOs), alongside non-governmental organizations (NGOs), often vocalize public condemnation. Researchers have examined NGO shaming, but no extant literature has comparatively explored if, how and why IOs shame. This article fills this gap. We conceptualize IO shaming as condemnatory speech acts and distinguish between the agent, targets and actions of shaming. We theorize how compliance and socialization are motives that lead IOs to shame. Empirically, we use new data on more than 3000 instances of IO shaming, covering 27 organizations between 1980 and 2015 to examine empirical patterns across the three dimensions of agents, targets and actions. We find that the majority of IOs do employ shaming but to varying degrees. Global, general-purpose IOs shame the most and regional, task-specific IOs the least. IOs mainly shame states, but there is a rise in the targeting of non-state and unnamed actors. While many condemned acts relate to human rights and security issues, IOs shame actions across the policy spectrum. These findings indicate that IO shaming is driven by compliance and socialization motives and that it is a wider phenomenon than previously recognized, suggesting possible avenues for further inquiry

Why international organizations commit to liberal norms

Recent decades have witnessed the emergence and spread of a broad range of liberal norms in global governance, among them sustainable development, gender equality, and human security. While existing scholarship tells us a lot about the trajectories of particular norms, we know much less about the broader patterns and sources of commitments to liberal norms by international organizations (IOs). This article offers the first comparative large-N analysis of such commitments, building on a unique dataset on IO policy decisions over the time period 1980-2015. Distinguishing between deep norm commitment and shallow norm recognition, the analysis produces several novel findings. We establish that IOs' deeper commitments to liberal norms primarily are driven by internal conditions: democratic memberships and institutional designs more conducive to norm entrepreneurship. In contrast, legitimacy standards in the external environment of IOs, often invoked in existing research, mainly account for shallower recognition or "talk" of norms

Decision-making in international organizations: institutional design and performance

International organizations (IOs) experience significant variation in their decision-making performance, or the extent to which they produce policy output. While some IOs are efficient decision-making machineries, others are plagued by deadlock. How can such variation be explained? Examining this question, the article makes three central contributions. First, we approach performance by looking at IO decision-making in terms of policy output and introduce an original measure of decision-making performance that captures annual growth rates in IO output. Second, we offer a novel theoretical explanation for decision-making performance. This account highlights the role of institutional design, pointing to how majoritarian decision rules, delegation of authority to supranational institutions , and access for transnational actors (TNAs) interact to affect decision-making. Third, we offer the first comparative assessment of the decision-making performance of IOs. While previous literature addresses single IOs, we explore decision-making across a broad spectrum of 30 IOs from 1980 to 2011. Our analysis indicates that IO decision-making performance varies across and within IOs. We find broad support for our theoretical account, showing the combined effect of institutional design features in shaping decision-making performance. Notably, TNA access has a positive effect on decision-making performance when pooling is greater, and delegation has a positive effect when TNA access is higher. We also find that pooling has an independent, positive effect on decision-making performance. All-in-all, these findings suggest that the institutional design of IOs matters for their decision-making performance, primarily in more complex ways than expected in earlier research

Selection and appointment in international adjudication : insights from political science

Stiansen’s work was supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223274 (PluriCourts). Financial support for Larsson’s work was provided by the Swedish Research Council, project no. 2018-01693.This article summarizes insights from political science and empirical legal scholarship concerning selection and appointment of adjudicators to permanent international courts (ICs). This scholarship suggests that designers of ICs face challenging trade-offs in balancing judicial independence and accountability, as well as in promoting descriptive representation and necessary qualifications on the bench. The article considers different institutional design features related to appointment procedures: representation, reappointment, screening procedures and procedures for removing judges. Representation is discussed in a series of sections considering full or selective representation, voting rules and geographic and gender quotas and aspirational targets. Throughout, we draw on data on 24 ICs to illustrate the different appointment procedures and institutional features.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

International courts and global democratic values: participation, accountability, and justification

In a post-Cold War era characterised by globalisation and deep interdependence, the actions of national governments increasingly have an effect beyond their own territorial borders. Moreover, key agents of global governance – international organisations and their bureaucracies, non-state actors and private agents – exercise pervasive forms of authority. Due to these shifts, it is widely noted that world politics suffers from a democratic deficit. This article contributes to work on global democracy by looking at the role of international courts. Building upon an original dataset covering the 24 international courts in existence since the end of the Second World War, we argue that international courts are able to advance democratic values and shape democratic practices beyond the state. They can do so by fostering equal participation, accountability, and public justification that link individuals directly with sites of transnational authority. We contend that the ability of international courts to promote these values is conditioned by institutional design choices concerning access rules, review powers, and provisions regarding judicial reason-giving. We canvass these design features of different international courts and assess the promises and pitfalls for global democratisation. We conclude by linking our analysis of international courts and global democratisation with debates about the legitimation and politicisation of global governance at large